Mark Cavendish was forced to abandon the Tour of Britain en route to Nottingham after a crash early in the stage when, his team said, he collided with a parked car.
He was taken to the Alexandra hospital in Stockport for examination of his left shoulder but there was no fracture. The bruising means Cavendish will have to rest for a few days before resuming training for the world road race championships in Virginia on 27 September.
“It looked like there was a car parked on the road and he hit it,” the Etixx-QuickStep directeur sportif, Brian Holm, told the Cyclingnews website.
That closed a bittersweet day for Etixx-QuickStep, stage winners for the third time in six days at the British Tour through Matteo Trentin. The Italian clung on to the race leader Edvald Boasson Hagen when the Norwegian made what could prove to be the key move of the race close to the finish of a hilly stage through the Peak District; Boasson Hagen stamped emphatically on the pedals and sprinted across the gap between the chasing group and Trentin, leaving the second-placed Wout Poels of Team Sky trailing in his wake.
Three kilometres later, Trentin took the stage win at the Forest Recreation Ground but Boasson Hagen’s second place and a six-second time bonus, plus a time bonus snatched earlier in the stage, enabled him to increase his overall lead on Poels from a single second overnight to 13. With two flat stages remaining – on Saturday a marathon through East Anglia, on Sunday, a circuit race in central London – that could well be enough to give the Norwegian his first stage race victory in two years.
Team Sky left the start at Stoke clearly determined to put Boasson Hagen and his MTN-Qhubeka team to the sword, attacking as the race headed into the Peak District and isolating the race leader, who was without team-mates for most of the stage. But Sky fell into a trap of their own making after a dangerman, the Spaniard Gorka Izaguirre, infiltrated a six-rider lead group that spent most of the stage dangling out in front.
Izaguirre’s aggression forced Sky to order Peter Kennaugh, Ben Swift and Ian Stannard to spend the bulk of the stage defending Poels’ second place, with Boasson Hagen getting a free ride through the constant succession of climbs and descents before profiting when the fatigue finally got to his former team-mates.
“It was really hard at the start, Sky were really strong and it split to pieces,” said Boasson Hagen, who brushed off requests from Sky to contribute until the final 15km into Nottingham, where Trentin sprang clear of Izaguirre’s group just before they were swept up. “They tried to talk me into working but I didn’t want to bring the lead group back before the final [intermediate] sprint. I was planning to attack at the end, when I saw Trentin was away I thought it was a good moment.”
With most of the sprinters finishing 45 minutes back, the Welsh youngster Owain Doull – named in Great Britain’s under-23 world championship squad on Friday morning – snatched third behind Trentin and Boasson Hagen to tighten his grip on the points lead and move to within a second of third place overall, showing form that bodes well for Richmond.
